by Tapio Salminen
Published in: Satakunta XXVIII Kotiseutututkimuksia. Kauppa ja kaupungit Satakunnassa. Porin Raatihuoneella 5. huhtikuuta 2008 pidetyt seminaarin esitelmät. Toim. Jorma Ahvenainen. Satakunnan Historiallinen Seura. Satakunnan Painotuote OY, Kokemäki 2011, 8-63.
Medieval towns in Finland - Current status and possible developments of future research especially concerning Ulvila... more
Medieval towns in Finland - Current status and possible developments of future research especially concerning Ulvila and Rauma. With English Summary.
Summary (preliminary version)
The article discusses past views and new developments in the study of medieval towns in Finland where only six merchant communities emerged as chartered towns before the year 1544 and established the social, economic and administrative structure characteristic to medieval towns in the European Middle Ages.
The oldest and largest of the medieval towns in Finland was Turku (sw. Åbo), which took form during the closing decades of the thirteenth century at the mouth of Aurajoki river within the densest populated area of the country. With the help of the needs of the bishop and cathedral chapter of Turku the town grew up into the largest urban centre in medieval Finland with some 2500 people. Since the surrounding provinces of Finland Proper and Satakunta built substantial part of financial resources of the Swedish crown in Finland, the headman of the castle of Turku some two kilometres outside of the town possessed important economical, military and administrational power, which further boosted the trade in the area. Although the actual military protection offered by the castle failed several times during the Middle Ages, the castellan exercised official jurisdiction over the town which gave him the possibility to control its trade and obliged the town council to follow his policy when dealing with alien powers outside and inside the realm.
The relationship between the town and the local agent of territorial power was even closer in Viipuri (sw. Viborg, today in Russia), where the town had emerged from a community of merchants and craftsmen at the service of the castle built in 1293. After the stabilisation of the Novgorodian border some 30 kms North-East of the castle in 1323 the fortress became one of the most important strongholds in the Swedish realm with excessive rights concerning the economy, jurisdiction and defence of the bailiwick. Even if archaeological evidence suggests that the site followed an earlier tradition of a Karelian fortress and a market place, the actual merchant town established itself only during the course of the fourteenth century. Final consolidation of an urban community separate of the castle is marked by the town charter of 1403. With a population of ca 2000 Viipuri was the only Finnish town ever to be enclosed with walls. Characteristic to the relationship, however, was that the initiative had not been taken by the town council but by a headman of the castle in the 1470's.
Of other four towns the oldest known charters of the town of Ulvila (sw. Ulfsby) at the mouth of Kokemäenjoki river date from the year 1365. Since earlier regulations concerning trade and jurisdiction of the town from the late 1340's exist, the consolidation of a permanent urban community must have began somewhat earlier. According to the remaining documentation, the initiative was most likely taken by royal authorities, who deliberately resettled an older merchant community from alongside the river to one location for better control of trade and revenues. Similar process seems to have taken place in the mouth of Porvoonjoki river during the closing decades of the fourteenth century, when a single urban community of Porvoo (sw. Borgå) emerged from several older but somewhat scattered merchant outposts at the river mouths of Eastern Nyland. The oldest documentation concerning the town dates from the year 1383, but the consolidation of the town may have occurred already in the 1340's in connection with reorganisation of the trade in the area. In 1442 the headman of Turku castle chartered the merchants of Rauma (sw. Raumo) with rights similar to the burghers of Turku in their trade. The community had originally took form around the beginning of the fifteenth century at Unio midway the sailing route from Turku to Ulvila. King Christopher confirmed the privileges in 1444. The town was later characterised by the influence of a Franciscan convent, the activity of which may even have co-occurred the formation of the urban community. The population of Ulvila, Porvoo and Rauma is likely to have never exceeded 1000 each. The smallest of all medieval towns in Finland was Naantali (sw. Nådendal) with no more than 200-300 inhabitants. The town was founded around 1443 in order to cover the needs of a new Bridgettine monastery some 25 kms north of Turku and remained of minor importance throughout the Middle Ages.
In addition to the six towns several merchant communities existed in medieval Finland which never succeeded in obtaining official charter of a town or building up a community strong enough to form one. Many of them can be documented either historically, archaeologically or both, but it is usually very difficult to locate them more precisely. Such are for instance the merchant communities of Vehkalahti and Virolahti, which the castellan of Viipuri cited in 1336 with the civitas of Viipuri as the three places in which the Revalian merchants were allowed to trade with the local population. Similar trading posts of permanent or seasonal nature took form as early as the fourteenth century in the main river mouths around Gulf of Bothnia, but they were able to establish themselves as towns only after the Middle Ages. Important quasi-urban settlements even emerged in the vicinity of some of the castles and main fortifications of the realm, but only some like Raasepori (sw. Raseborg) , Kyrkosund or Hämeen linna (sw. Tavastehus) probably never got near of anything like in Viipuri and never succeeded in obtaining an official charter for their trade.
In the article the past scholarship over the Finnish medieval towns and especially those of Ulvila and Rauma towns are discussed. One of the more general assumptions of the older studies on the medieval towns in Finland has been their suggested smallness in respect to the large urban centres and multitude of middle-sized towns known from the more densely populated areas of Central Europe, England and the Mediterranean. Here the general opinion of more recent scholarship has been that the smallness of the Finnish urban centres in terms of number of sworn burghers, population and amalgamate relationship with the surrounding countryside resulted from the economic premises of Finnish areas where permanent field cultivation and animal husbandry mattered as prevailing means of livelihood only in the most densely populated Southern Finland with soils lending to high and late medieval agricultural technologies and even there often in the context of other forms of local economy such as fishing, hunting and prescription of forests. Since all the chartered Finnish medieval towns were situated at the coast and in close attachment to areas of permanent field cultivation, the older scholarship has logically maintained that the most important reason contributing to the number of urban centres and their location in Finland was the contemporary structure of economy, where only areas with established agricultural production were able to sustain permanent town populations of any kind and the flow of transregional trade in necessities such as salt predestined the location of the towns on coast and river mouths.
In the article the number of the Finnish medieval towns, size of population and location at the coasts are then discussed form the point of view what is known of the overall size of towns and urban centres in the Baltic Sea area as well as the origins and nature of regulated merchant activity and towns in the medieval Swedish realm. As Konrad Fritze has already in 1986 shown the majority of late medieval towns in the Baltic Sea area of interaction were small; of the total of 431 towns in ca. 1450 more than half had an estimated population of less than 5000 and every fifth less than 1000. Instead of being exceptionally small, the six chartered Finnish medieval towns presented a selection of lesser urban centres characteristic to the late medieval Baltic Sea area and well comparable to similar nodes of local merchant and artisan activity elsewhere in Europe. Instead of developing a more balanced geographical distribution between coastal ports and inland centres at the crossroads of important transport routes, however, the division of chartered coastal towns and townless inland evidently is an remains a Finnish speciality for which a variety of structural, economic and political reasons can be established. One of the most important of these may have been the role of the politics of the central authority of the realm and the evident desire of established agents of merchant interest in (Turku) and outside (Stockholm and Reval/Tallinn) Finland in controlling their interests in the Finnish areas, which appears to have pre-empted any possibilities of establishing chartered towns in Finnish inland since the mid 14th century. The politics of the merchant elites of Stockholm against all real or suspected rivals in the Gulf of Bothnia area are well documented in the medieval sources and the influence of Reval and merchant elites of Turku to the overall economic policy of the central authority in Finland should not be underestimated. Important economic and factual power also centred in castles of the Swedish realm in Finland the headmen and bailiffs of which cultivated close and reciprocal contacts with wealthy merchants in Reval, Stockholm and Turku, which further may have encouraged the preservation of mercantile status quo what came to establishing new towns outside those that already existed. Of special interest here, for instance, is, that the chartering of Rauma by Karl Knutsson in 1442 occurred during his overlordship of Western Finland after his failure to establish a permanent grip of the crown of Sweden during his regency in the late 1430s and after the election of King Christopher of Bavaria in 1442 when the king and the council of the realm had de facto compensated him with the enfeoffment of Turku castle and underlying areas in Finland in return of his sworn oath to the authority of the realm. The chartering of Rauma by Karl Knutsson in 1442 and the confirmation of its status by king Christopher in 1444 must also be understood as a joint action of the representatives of the central authority of the crown in creating a plausible terminal of trade on the Finnish coastline between Turku and Ulvila to retain control of the fish oriented trade of the area and merchants operating there at a time when a new ecclesiastic and economic centre was created and chartered in Naantali with access to the same area and resources.
The article also gives a short review of the results of recent archaeological excavations in Turku and Rauma and reinterpretations of the earlier 1970s excavations of Ulvila, which show that the everyday urban culture in ”small” Finnish towns did not lag behind other similar or larger centres in the Baltic area with the use of glass artefacts, multilingual spoken and written environment of interaction and an established mixture of local and transregional social, ethnic and cultural manifestations of society. Recent excavations both in Turku and Rauma also prove that both towns were deliberately planned and founded; Turku at the end of the 13th century and the beginning of the 14th most likely by a joint action of the central authority of the realm and the bishop and Rauma in the beginning if the 1440s by that time local overlord Karl Knutsson and the central authority of the realm with some kind of participation of Franciscan activit yin the place. In the history of Rauma and the surrounding hinterland of Satakunta the cultural, spiritual and economic role of the Franciscan house of Rauma has often been enthusiastically emphasised but remains vaguely studied, even if a more thorough examination and structural and sociocultural analysis of late 15th century Franciscan activity in the Gulf of Bothnia area is likely to give important contributions to various aspects in the history of Finland and Sweden as well as the history of the Franciscan order in Scandinavia in general.
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